This semantics-of-counterfactuals business is the kind of thing philosophers argue about all the time--"If Caesar were fighting the Korean war, he would have used the bomb." "No, if Caesar were fighting the Korean war, he would have used catapults."

We're been spoilt by Althouse's photographic and artistic eye. Pretty much anybody can say, "Aw, purdy as a postcard," lift up their point and shoot, compose a shot, and snap a half decent picture, but it takes an artistic eye to see within that potentiality and extract the elements that make a photograph interesting.

A painter and a photographer both fill a frame. The art of a painter lies in their deciding what goes into the frame, and at some point they must decide when to stop filling it. The art of photography lies in deciding what to omit from the frame.

If I may. How many ponds at Giverny have you already seen? They are all studies in light. Without the light, the study of it, the sense of what light is doing to the subject, the way it crawls around and envelops objects, blows out portions, conceals other areas, flecks off and scintillates, you have a pond without a trace of Monet.

Here's where shooting in RAW could salvage an ordinary photograph, and lacking the RAW file, a little time spent in iPhoto or Photoshop, Gimp or another program of which there are too many to list.

The photo is pretty but that is all. It lacks contrast, there is no focal interest, the eye wanders around the composition aimlessly and settles on nothing in particular. Imagining the histogram, the lines are all piled up like a mountain on the left, and peter out stopping well short of the right edge. Meaning, lots of shadowing with muted highlights and precious little contrast. It's murky, and it doesn't have to be.

Recommendations: Pick an element within the scene and work with that. The bridge? No, a portion of the bridge. Put the viewer at the bridge. Let an edge fade out to bokeh. Attempt to use the full range of the camera's sensors. That is, shadow to highlights. Adjust the camera settings to achieve that full range. The mass of lilly pads? No, a group of lily pads. The rock border? No, a portion of the rock border. The trees? Stand under a tree and aim upward. Fill the frame with branches and leaves. Work with the camera until you get a satisfying contrast between leaves, branches and sky.

This concludes my pedantry for the nonce associated with this single photograph.